The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.
Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for “transport”.
Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.
What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther’s outburst “Death to the Law!” which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became “Death to the Jews!” The Germans would not have crucified Jesus: they would have exterminated him at Auschwitz, their version of the Temple.
We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.
Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett’s canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett’s Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.
Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.
I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature.
Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.
The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.
I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen’s work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.
Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
The inventor knows HOW to borrow.
Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden.